Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on Building a Massive Community |
Posted: July 31, 2012 |
Photo courtesy of Brandon King
If you've "checked in" to an urban hotspot, say thank you to Dennis Crowley, the 36-year-old co-founder of location-based social tool Foursquare. Using Foursquare's smartphone app, users can discover local businesses and places to go, and share their discoveries and whereabouts with friends -- often while earning badges and saving money through special offers. Foursquare says it has 20 million registered users and works with more than 750,000 businesses, large and small. In 2010, about a year after launching Foursquare, Crowley turned down separate acquisition offers from tech giants Facebook and Yahoo!. Foursquare's most recent round of financing -- $50 million last year from Andreessen Horowitz, among other groups -- reportedly valued the company at $600 million. We sat down with Crowley to discuss what makes a tech startup great. What follows is an edited version of our conversation: Related: HTC's Cher Wang on Innovation and the 'It' Product Entrepreneur: What sets apart successful startups that attract millions of consumers from those that never really get off the ground? We built Foursquare literally for ourselves and for our group of 10 friends. And it turns out that when you build things that 10 of your friends like, their friends like them and their friends like them -- and then you suddenly get to millions of users. Entrepreneur: How do you generate ideas and figure out which ones to pursue? We're different because we've hired so many rock stars. No one wants to be the guy that just sits there and is executing on someone else's ideas. We have to think up these different ways of allowing people to get their ideas out there. Entrepreneur: How does an entrepreneur know when to sell? Did you make the right call by not selling to Facebook or Yahoo? That's the thing that we can do better than anyone else: execute on our ideas. That's the focus that we need to have to be successful. Related: From $200 Million to $500K: Lessons from Digg's Slow Demise Entrepreneur: What's your advice for tech entrepreneurs who want to build something big? You can't listen to them, and you really have to build this stuff on your own. Prove to yourself that it's either a good idea or it's not. …You have to be totally fine with throwing things away and realizing you might have to throw away five before you find one good thing.
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